Saturday, January 18th, 2014 &nbsp 11:02 pm |&nbsp Category: &nbsp Humor &nbsp | &nbsp Add Comment &nbsp Author: &nbsp Paul Burri, RSA posts: 22 Author's bioXPaul Burri, RSABackground: Paul Burri is a self-described retired smart ass who feels he has earned the right to say anything he damn well pleases. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, business consultant, educator, newspaper columnist and has been a SCORE (www.score.org) counselor for over nine and a half years. Over his 65-year business career he has owned 9 businesses and has worked as general manager for many small companies and on a managerial level for such major companies as Northrop-Grumman and The Disney Corporation. He has over 175 inventions to his credit, counseled over 190 SCORE clients, served as a docent at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, sits on the board of directors of several local small businesses, and is currently writing a book about small business.

He lives with his wife in Santa Barbara CA and can be contacted at pburri@cox.net and has nothing better to do than to tell his "war stories" to whoever will listen - many times repeatedly.

I think I have invented a new hobby for myself. I call it “twerking” because I keep twerking various companies to see if I can get them to admit their weaknesses and failings.

This past week or so I continued to twerk the help-with-your-invention companies. I decided that chrome plated vegetables wasn’t ludicrous enough so this time I told four different companies that I was working on something that was even more idiotic. (Of course I didn’t tell them that.) In the box where they asked me to describe my invention, this is what I put down.

“We are working on a formula that will bring dead pets back to life. We have had some limited success so far. Our laboratory has developed a pill that makes live pets dead. Phase II will be a pill that has no effect at all.”

Believe it or not, three of the four companies are still interested in working with me to help me patent the idea. (If I’m willing to send them a check for $685.00 of course.) (More on this below.)

Here’s another “twerker” of mine but first a brief explanation. If you have ever done a Google search, you know that it will frequently yield many, many pages of results. It is an accepted marketing fact that if your company is not on the first or second page, you have little chance of being contacted by a prospective buyer. So that resulted in the so-called science of Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. There are SEO companies that will work on your web site to have your company appear on pages one or two when a prospect does a web search.

The other day I Googled the words “search engine optimization” and up popped about 43 pages of companies offering to do that for me. I presume you see the irony of a company promising to use special techniques – at a husky fee – to place me on page one or two when they are on page 42 themselves.

I called one of the companies on page 42 pretending to be dumb (that was the easy part) and the conversation went something like this.

Them – “A-one Optimizer Company.”

Me – “Hi. I’ve been hearing about this search engine ultimatum (sic) thing. Is that what you do?”